This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

For the past several months I've heard Gov. Gary Herbert and other elected officials and community leaders tout Utah's unemployment rate, now down to 5.8 percent compared to 7.8 percent nationally. The other statistic we hear a lot is that Utah's economy is growing at double the rate of the rest of the nation.

As comparatively impressive as Utah's performance has been, revised statistics now show we were doing even better than reported. According to the Salt Lake Chamber, from March to July of this year, Utah's economy was growing at or above our historic average  closer to triple the national growth rate.

Despite losing nearly 90,000 jobs when the national economy fell apart, Utah finished July just 6,473 jobs shy of digging out of the sizable hole. In short, our economy has regained the jobs that Gen. Peter Cooke claims in his own economic plan "aren't coming back."

Utah has traveled the road to recovery. We are now out of the hole and growing. That's just one reason Herbert will have my support on Election Day.